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“Ok, content curation is important, now what?”

The need for great content curators has never been more urgent. And if you’re like most of us, you have tons of important content, such as documents, videos, spreadsheets, family photos…

But what happens when you can’t find the right content when you need it? It’s time you turn to eXie.

eXie was designed specifically to help you easily collect, organize, curate and share all your important information. And since it runs entirely online, everything is accessible from anywhere, anytime. eXie is a highly scalable cloud-based platform for planning, curating and publishing content collections without the cost, complexity or learning curve normally associated with applications of comparable purpose

The problem of personally organizing content certainly reminds us of the challenge of organizing data.

In the data management world, the original disruptive innovation was the personal calculator-with-a-memory. But even more influential, many would argue, was the spreadsheet.

If you leave out storytelling, building spreadsheets is one of the few ways that most people have ever stepped beyond lists and outlines when they wanted to represent a logical grouping of subject matters. The “natural” appeal of spreadsheets is easy to describe: I have several things that I care about (columns) and I care about each of them in several ways (rows). It is not very difficult to navigate the collection of data.

The simplicity of that approach is why it is so easy to stretch beyond organizing “facts” (the typical spreadsheet ingredient) into organizing “ideas” (the stuff that content collections are made of). I have several ideas that I care about (columns) and I think about each of them in several ways (rows).

A typical frame of reference (or framework) tackles the task of organizing ideas about a given subject area. Usually, the first challenge is to decide what is important to understand about the subject “this time”. We “model” the subject area — literally, we represent it — with those decisions.

If there are three main things to know this time, the framework considers them to be three “dimensions”. The most familiar example of this is with objects, where we can pay attention to the height, width and depth — 3 dimensions. We might add a fourth dimension — time — and even a fifth dimension such as cost. You can probably imagine that fewer dimensions are easier to manage and think about than are more dimensions…

Finding Content Value

One of the biggest challenges we have now is from having so much unrestricted access to information. Whether we see information as data or as ideas, nearly everyone experiences an overload of it. The problem is not something that just happens to us; much of the time it is because we are actively looking for information, using fairly powerful tools; and in the process we’re simply getting more than we needed or knew what to do with.

When we get around to taking the resulting collection of information seriously, one issue is to separate the valuable stuff from the rest. But we are easily reminded that, like clothing, particular information has varying importance according to how and when it might be used. We might keep a wide range of things just in case”…

Often we find that if someone else goes through our collection of information they come away thinking of different dimensions than we do. The difference is usually attributable to their point of view and their need. That is, we may not always be aware of how the information can have value until someone or something shows us. Punchline: there is not only one “right” way to understand something. There can be multiple ways. The dimensions that you choose make up your model of the subject area at that time. You can also make or get other models for other occasions.

One of our colleagues from the “data science” world, Joseph Pusztai at the company Cubewise, talks about this same flexibility. He writes:

“…accurately representing the dimensionality of your model is where “modeling art” meets “modeling science”. Many data mining (e.g. classification and clustering) algorithms purport to identify the naturally occurring dimensionality and hierarchies in your data, but often human intuition can do a better job, as well as enable you to introduce new dimensions into your model that did not historically exist (e.g. a car company launching their first electric vehicle will have no historical sales or production data for it). Humans are also very good at understanding that there is rarely one giant monolithic model behind a set of data, rather, we are usually dealing with dozens or even hundreds of smaller independent models, holistically interacting with each other along common dimensions. “

In that statement, we can substitute a few words (switch “data” to “content”) to recognize how the statement applies to ideas (concepts) as well as to facts.

An algorithm is like a filter; the way the filter is constructed will allow some things to be kept on top or forward, while other things fall through or away. We might literally discover a range of different things that have something in common keeping them caught, as one group, by the filter. As an alternative to algorithms, human intuition, usually reflecting experience or belief, can also provide a filter and a “commonality” that groups things. That one thing found in common is like a dimension.

Human understanding, especially including different flavors and levels of subject expertise, easily accounts for why one framework can satisfy an audience while other frameworks are also valid for the same content. With eXie, one collection of content can be seen in various ways, for example by several of the different personas that are found among eXie users. A historian, a teacher, and a designer may have different respective frameworks for the same collection of content.

Do It Yourself

For your own purposes: when you pick a subject area, decide what level of expertise you want to use, and choose your “dimensions” (called themes in eXie), you are then well on your way to cataloging your curated (selected) content items for an audience. (Remember that your primary audience may be yourself in some future moment!)

By using themes to point out what you care about in the subject, your framework columns get named. Then you can point out the main ways that you usually care about those themes, which become names for your framework rows (called topics).

In data modeling, there is a lot of excitement about the powerful new tools that analyze facts and discover ways to organize them in models. With content collections, subject matter experience is held in an extremely fast and powerful tool — the mind — and modeling the collection of concepts takes place with both some new discoveries and as reinforcement of what is already familiar.

This month alone, we’ve identified more than eight separate conferences we’d like to attend during the next eight weeks. The wealth of provided information would be a fantastic update of our current wisdom and beliefs!

But, there’s just this one problem. Okay, there are six problems.

Many of them occur at the same time.

Most of them are in different locations.

We don’t even want to know the full price tag for the ones that say things like “Register early and save $600…”

Airports.

Only about a third of the content at any conference will be reachable during its live presentation, so let’s see, that’s how many dollars per live presentation?

The best use of the content would be withother people — especially when we got back. But for most of the conferences, it would have to be a solo trip, or maybe just one other person coming along, and it isn’t clear if non-attendees can use the content unless we find a way to distribute it appropriately ourselves.

SO, we’re thinking, do we have a LOT of urgency about making it to these conferences? Hmmm… not so much. They definitely would have to be offering something that we can’t get anywhere else, at least for which there is no reasonable alternative.

It’s 2015, and the chance that there is no reasonable alternative gets slimmer and slimmer.

To some extent, we get to dump the airport because we have Google, Bing, and other tools to do the “travelling” for us. If we know what the topic and problem is that we are studying, then there is a near certainty that valuable relevant content is going to pop up in our search results.

Meanwhile, the conference has an agenda; but we have eXie and the frame of reference approach.

So instead of booking premium digs in the time/space continuum, we can look for a “return” on a different “investment”.

Search the web for topical content (and don’t be surprised how often conference speakers have released their ideas already on the web)

Save the search results in a logicalway for future reference

Add and save findings conveniently at our own pace

Include multiple sources of content on any given idea

Work without any restrictions on the timingof our next chance to access any stored topic

In fact, in this approach, we have one main challenge: curating what we found. Whether we are researching topics as different as air travel and how a company is making personnel decisions, the first thing that we will encounter is the vast array of content suppliers, formats and styles that are already available to us – not to mention quality.

Our biggest tradeoff, in getting the advantage of this approach, is the time and effort we will spend on curating instead of on travel, expense reports, and catching up with the work we couldn’t get done while we were away. What we want is the confidence that the content is worth tracking because the time we spend curating it cost us less than the benefit we’ll get from re-using it.

Beneficial re-use is the essence of Reference Material. By focusing on whether re-using an item of content is likely to be valuable, selecting it is less difficult to decide.

By making an eXie frame with that in mind, the content is found in the future according to what it says about how a subject should be considered and why it should be considered that way. A frame can be designed as simply as deciding a few ideas that are important about (within) a subject, along with a reason why each of those ideas is important. Those become the criteria for curating. The important ideas are frame columns (themes); each row is about something that makes the ideas important (topics).

In that design there is no limitation on how many items of content can be found and selected to add to the curated collection – but every selected item is clearly relevant in an obvious and practical way. Being practical, it will “pay off”, each time it is used.

As a result of keeping the curated content in the same location for future access, we replace the conference (only available under a few limited circumstances of time and place) with a living, evolving knowledge-base (always on, always available).

When you create a new frame in eXie, or when you select an existing template or frame, the key idea is to get one that is appropriate to the reason you have for using the collection of content. at that time. We help you identify that in advance by associating every frame or template with a “Use Case”.

What Are USE CASES?

A Use Case indicates HOW the framed content is intended to be useful.

The content in the chosen frame may either be used for a particular purpose, or used as a particular type of instrument.

Examples of Used For will be things like this:

Training

Guidance

Marketing

Planning

Coaching

Designing

Auditing

Research

Examples of Used As will be things like this:

Knowledge base

Curriculum

Portfolio

Agenda

Catalog

Specification

Project Plan

Evidence

In eXie, the difference between one Use Case and another is typified in the labels of the columns and rows of an eXie frame. People who have great familiarity about a case of usage can provide their expertise in deciding what labels are strong ways for everyone to think about the related content.

In that way, Use Cases help us to define Templates and to keep content collections strongly linked to what actually makes them most valuable – their active usage.

A related idea in eXie is Context. In eXie we want to identify WHERE and WHY the content is being used. So, we offer a separate Context descriptor to allow you to include that with your frame.

A Use Case associates with contexts like these:

Certain events or timing

Specific roles or groups

Certain types of activity or processes

Examples of contexts will be things like this:

Season, meeting, product, publication or exhibition

Teacher or Owner or Customer

Education or Sports or Strategy or Customer Support

Summary:

There can be a frame of content for which things like the following are true: